By Hugo Marcos, Secretary-General of CIFFT (International Committee of Tourism Film Festivals)

Every year, the CIFFT circuit screens hundreds of tourism films from every corner of the world. From that vantage point you stop noticing individual campaigns and start noticing currents — what the whole industry is quietly moving toward. The strongest current today has little to do with what appears on screen. It runs through the way people decide to travel at all, and artificial intelligence now sits at the very start of that journey.

The numbers are hard to ignore. In KAYAK and TikTok's 2026 “What the Future” report, which surveyed 14,000 younger travelers, 41% said they trust an AI recommendation more than advice from friends or social media. Google has reported that searches for an AI travel assistant grew by roughly 350% in a single year. And according to a 2026 survey published by IMG, travelers who use AI rely on it mostly to get recommendations, plan itineraries and find inspiration — while only around one in eight use it to actually book.

Read carefully, those figures tell a precise story. AI has taken over the logistics of travel: discovering, comparing, planning, organizing. It has reorganized the how. What it has not touched — and this is the part the industry keeps overlooking — is the why. The desire to go somewhere is not a logistical problem. It is an emotional one, and emotion is still built the old-fashioned way: through stories.

This is where many destinations are about to make an expensive mistake. Faced with the rise of AI, the instinct is to optimize everything for the algorithm — to be efficient, searchable, recommendable. That is necessary, but it is not sufficient. A destination that speaks only to the machine becomes frictionless and forgettable at the same time. The places that will win are the ones that are desired by people and legible to machines.

Far from making storytelling obsolete, AI makes it more valuable. As automated recommendations converge and begin to sound alike, an authentic, well-told audiovisual narrative becomes the one thing that sets a destination apart. It is also, increasingly, the raw material the algorithms themselves learn from. Good tourism film now works for two audiences at once: the person who feels it and the system that indexes it.

There is a quieter consequence too. When content becomes infinite — and when much of it is generated by machines — human-validated quality turns into a rare and precious signal. Knowing that a piece of work has been judged on its merits, by people who watch the best in the world, means more today than it did a decade ago. Scarcity has shifted from content to credibility.

Artificial intelligence will increasingly tell us how and when to travel. But why we dream of a particular place will keep depending on the stories we are able to tell about it. The future of tourism is not decided in the technology. It is decided in the emotion — and that is still ours to create.

Sources
KAYAK & TikTok, “What the Future” Report 2026, published 15 January 2026 (survey of 14,000 Gen Z and Millennial travelers).
Google, 2026 travel trends, Google blog, April 2026.
IMG, 2026 traveler survey, reported by ITIJ, March 2026.